How I work with AI
Human perspective, AI support. I’m Alastair, or Al to my friends. I’ve been using AI across various businesses for the past three years, and while I’ve found it incredibly useful, I’ve experienced plenty of its frustrations too.
My lightbulb moment on the limitations of AI automation: Yoast schema files
I’d lived through the common problems of AI trying to turn my content into generic slop, of it hallucinating then confidently presenting “facts”, but it wasn’t until I began to question why Google and AI platforms weren’t understanding one of my businesses that it really hit home.
Like many people, I knew I needed schema files, but didn’t know much about them, so I was happy to trust an automated facility on my hosting platform.
When I poked my head under the bonnet, though, I discovered that what the platform had presented was incorrect in places and missing lots of key information. So I researched what was actually required, then worked with AI to build out the missing information and code properly.
Within weeks, the business was being cited by AI platforms and I was starting to get leads through them. More importantly, my relationship with AI had changed from enthusiastic user to master inquisitor.
What AI support brings, and what human perspective transforms
AI, if properly directed, can do a lot of the heavy lifting, such as research and technical groundwork. Given my past three years of experience, I am naturally cautious and often have multiple platforms checking each other’s homework before my final pass.
How AI can support
- Analysing competitors and markets
- Investigating how Google and AI platforms interpret a sector
- Building schema and structured data following my input
- Comparing how different search environments handle the same business
- Identifying technical opportunities
- Speeding up research and fact-checking
- Testing how different AI systems currently understand a website
My human perspective role
- Understanding the founder and the business behind the website
- Prioritising the commercial content according to customer search data
- Identifying which customer reviews and testimonials to promote
- Finding the people stories that give a business a personality and build trust
- Creating content and layouts that work for the people using the website while giving search engines and AI platforms the information they need
- Final judgement on what gets published
Artificial Intelligence or Articulated Incompetence?
After 3 years of using AI, I still ask myself this question every day. Whilst it’s important to realise where AI can be of assistance, it’s even more important to recognise where it can let us down. Fortunately, my ADHD brain with its own internal 47 tabs open at any time can see through the bullshit, but it does reinforce why we need human overview.
- Hallucinating facts and presenting them confidently, including creating fake links.
- Short-term memory loss, even within the same conversation.
- Confusing businesses with similar names and citing the wrong one’s reviews.
- Presenting recycled blog content as a primary source during a research brief.
- Sycophancy: agreeing with whatever’s suggested because agreeable answers score better than correct ones.
- Date blindness: you want the latest guidelines, not those from 2023.
- No actual intelligence, just a best estimate of which words statistically go together.
- Defaulting to robotic AI slop language and structure suggestions when I ask it to review a document, despite having previously uploaded a three-page brand guideline document to stop this happening in the first place.
Copywriting: the power and subtlety of well-chosen words
AI is trained to write in a particular style, and it’s pretty obvious when we see it. Suddenly, there’s a credibility gap: how do we trust the person if we can’t trust the words?
Over my past 30-odd years in business, effective copywriting has been one of the key elements of my success. My skill is taking complex technical issues and breaking them down into plain English whilst weaving in human storytelling.
Be it discovering an amazing wine to recommend to a UK buyer and them listing it because of the unique story as much as what was in the bottle or the price. Or the articles I write for my alcohol moderation coaching business, that were so thorough that Google Scholar started indexing them and sending me traffic.
In creating websites for other businesses, I am enjoying researching unfamiliar industries and interweaving the human story and perspective. Check out my latest launch, mrmtreeservices.co.uk, to see why human-created content beats generic AI slop all day long.
Not sure what a technical term means? Check out our plain English glossary.
That is how I work with AI.
Using its speed and technical capabilities extensively, but policing it thoroughly before taking the final decisions myself. Human perspective, AI support.